Creating GIF Animations For Websites

GIF animations have become popular on community sites, as the interactive features of the images serve as a great reminder to help residents remember the community events, or to help employees with the company's projects.

You can create GIF animations, without receiving a patent from Unisys, then you can use the Portable Network Graphics format that works equally well and can be cheaper. Many sites now use the PNG format as you can create more advanced animations with the PNG format.

Using the PNG format will come in handy after graduation, when you run your own business with your own clients. You will be able to reduce costs by using this form of GIF animations, and could really start making money for your business.

To find more ideas for GIF animations, designs or to find out how to enroll in a school for animation, read the examples, class plans and information on animations on www.devry.com.

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Web Graphic Design Software To Build Websites

You can use web graphic design and programming skills to create interactive characters on your website, that are linked to your company. For example, if you have a mascot, like an animal or animated object to promote your business, it should be part of your website as well. The character can help to lead customers through all the pages on your site.

Once you develop web graphic design techniques and use the right software, you will have a wider range of digital design choices. For example, you can choose the right colors and develop design ideas for your site.

This means, you can customize your site as much as you want. For example, you can create borders around each web page, with the same color scheme as your logo, or use an animated font that will go on each page on your site.

It may also be a good idea to purchase Adobe Dreamweaver and install it on your computer, go through the tutorials that will teach how to use the software and learn more about how to build a great website. You can also visit the Adobe Dreamweaver website to get more tips and ideas to improve your site.

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Creating A Better Website With Interactive Animations

To create interactive animations, you must learn how to make the images move, using your computer programs. Interactive animations can only be used for the computer, or can be programmed on your PC, and then transferred to multimedia presentations or uploaded to websites, depending on the project requirements.

For example, you can animate a logo or a banner on a website, or create animated buttons to navigate to different sections of the website. Another option, is to create a character that talks to the audience and explains each of the pages of the site, or an avatar to answer customer questions.

Interactive animations can help improve the reputation of a company, and with the presence of a live support avatar created just for customer service and answering customer questions, can be a pleasant surprise for your customers.

If you want to learn how to create interactive animations on your computer, then you can try CrazyTalk, which is a computer animation program, that allows you to create avatars, to look more human.

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Finding Sites To Watch Videos Online

Watch videos online for entertainment and increase your skills with online courses. I like to visit online video sites like YouTube to watch funny videos and finding online courses for software I use on my computer.

I even watch videos on gardening, cooking and home improvement. If I need to know how to do a task around the home, I conduct a search for videos on the topic.

Some of the courses may be the complete online course for free, or it may include a couple of videos for free and then you have to run to the site to pay for the rest of the videos. This way the video creator can recoup some of the production costs.

I always like to search what is available on the video topic and then watch some of the free videos, read the offer for the rest of the videos on the website and decide if I wish to pay for the rest of the course.

If I can’t find what I need on YouTube, I enter the search topic on Google and find the videos I need on other sites. But whenever I like to watch videos, my first stop is YouTube.

I sometimes spend hours watching entertaining movie clips on YouTube. I love the ones where they pull some funny stunts, although I try to avoid watching videos where people or animals get hurt. Among the millions of videos, there are some trash videos, most are far better than the funniest home video shows on TV!

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Baby Pictures On My Family Website

Baby pictures of your newborn can be shown to family members, friends and relatives. Some family members may be living in far away towns and overseas, so you may need to share some of these images of your baby online.

We, as a family are so proud of a new addition to our family, that we want to send images of our newborn to everyone that cannot come and see the baby. I have even received requests from those who have come to see our newborn, that they want to see new images of our baby, as they become available.

I am setting up a family website with videos and images of our newborn. I am looking at updating these images every few months, as the baby grows to a young child. I will inform my friends and relatives when I have updated our family website with new baby pictures.

These images will be in a secure section of the website, with password access only, as I do not want everyone to see all these images, just my nearest and dearest. Some of my friends had shown me images of their children online, so now it is my turn to show my images.

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Finding A Free Online Music Guide

The age of digging through CD bins at the local music store may be long gone. Our store has become much bigger and offers many more modes for listening. Do we want these songs physically on our computers, taking up hard drive space but linking to our ipods?

Do we want to stream new music online as we browse websites? Do we want music downloads from websites or from our peers? Or do we want to make play-lists of our favorite songs to post on our social networking pages? As you can see, it takes a music guide to get you through this muck of online music options.

Another great music guide resource for streaming songs is Jamendo (www.jamendo.com). This site offers the largest catalog of music under Creative Commons licenses worldwide, which means that you'll find entire albums and songs available for free.

The benefit of using this new music site is that you can download, rate, review, comment and share all the songs for free and you can even put songs on your iPhone. The downside is that you probably haven't heard of any of these artists and you'll need to have an open mind about finding new artists. Even so, using genre tags can help you discover music downloads you'll dig.

Another indie artist music guide is Amie Street (www.amiestreet.com). This recommendation website works off your preferences and allows you to import data from your iTunes library, your Last FM feed, your Pandora radio preferences and favorite music from Facebook.

After analyzing your music preferences, the site will offer similar recommendations, allowing you to rate those recommendations. The benefit is that you can find a lot of new music and buy music legally.

The downside is just that you have to buy many of the tracks, although some come as cheap as 2¢ apiece.

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Reasons To Make A Web Page

Make a web page and show your artistic talents online. There are so many ways to make new web pages these days. One of the cheapest, is to use a free blog with Blogger or Wordpress. Another way, is to have a basic site with a small number of web pages, and increase the content over a period of time. As you keep adding more pages, you may attract more traffic to your website.

Once you have uploaded the new pages, you need to ensure all the pages are displaying correctly and all the links are working. You also need to check your web pages with different browsers, as some browsers may display your web pages differently, from the display you see on your favorite browser. You should also check your pages with a validator, to ensure there are no errors on your web pages.

Apart from using the basic fonts, you should also use web safe colours. This means, your colors should be viewed the same everywhere on the internet. If you have a colour you really love, another person may see a different colour when visiting your website.

For this reason, you need to ensure all the colours on your pages are web safe and always include the hex code, in your programming code, to ensure browsers show the correct colors.

Before you upload your new pages, validate your pages, to ensure there are no code errors. You should check for spelling mistakes. Once your new pages are uploaded, view them on different browsers, to ensure the web pages are displayed correctly.

You should always be ready to make changes, after you make a web page.

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Getting The Word Out With High School Graduation Announcements

High school graduation announcements tell your friends and relatives, the day of your graduation has almost arrived. You want everyone to know, you have accomplished this stage of your life and are ready to face the next stage.

In you announcement, you can include information about yourself, your accomplishments, an interesting design with images of yourself as a child to now. You may also include your email address, the location and time of the graduation ceremony.

You may include links to your family website, so people can stay in touch to graduation day. Those who cannot attend your graduation, can watch video clips of your graduation ceremony on your website.

Having a website, will help those who could not attend your graduation, to feel as they are part of the event. Even though some of your friends and relatives may be at work, living in another state or even overseas, they can be kept up to date with your graduation by visiting your website.

Once you graduate, you can show potential employers or even help your college application, with a link to your website. There are so many ways you can get the word out with high school graduation announcements.

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Finding Quality Photos With An Image Search Engine

Image search engine can be used to locate images to complete a website, or finalise that project. You may not have the time to shoot the images you need, but you can often find similar images available with online photo sites and stock photo libraries. Many of these sites, have their own image search engine, to make it easier to locate those images to meet your needs.

The easiest way to locate images online, is with search engines, but you do not know the quality of images you will locate. If you are a member of a membership site, giving access to millions of quality images, then you are in a better position to find the perfect images to finalize your project.

Many of these sites, may have membership fees and fees to use the images, but you may find these reasonable as they help you complete your work and meet those deadlines.

There are millions of images stored by stock libraries online. If you are using the images for professional purposes, then it may be a good idea to become a member of a number of stock libraries, so that you will have ready access to many images.

Once you know the images you need, then have the words ready, to describe the content of those images to enter into an image search engine.

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Reducing Bandwidth Costs With An Image Hosting Service

Image hosting service can help cut the cost of hosting images on your website. If you have a family website, with many images and videos, then you may have to pay more for bandwidth to your hosting service provider.

But, if you use an image hosting service, then your images are not hosted on the same server as your website, and therefore you are not faced with increased bandwidth costs. There are free image hosting services, but they have annoying ads and image size restrictions.

If you have a small site, with free access and you do not want to pay for the extra bandwidth you may need to host images and video, then you may look at using a free image hosting service.

If you are running an online business and you need to run databases with a large number of images and videos, then it may be worthwhile to either use a paid image hosting service or use your site to host your images and video and either pay for more bandwidth, or better still, use a dedicated server.

As cost of bandwidth becomes cheaper, it may be better to use a paid hosting service or pay for more bandwidth. There are some hosting services that allow you to use unlimited bandwidth with a dedicated server. Although these hosting servers are more expensive than a shared server that most sites use, you may find in the long run, you may be making more sales as you will not be scaring customers with annoying ads and image size restrictions that are prevalent with a free image hosting service.

All you need to do, is shop around and find out what hosting services other people in your field are using. You may find a lot of them are using the same reliable hosting companies and they are using a dedicated server. I myself, am talking to my hosting service provider and asking them about their dedicated servers. I am prepared to move my sites to another hosting service where I can get more bandwidth with a reliable dedicated server.

I am hoping to find a quality hosting service over the next few months, without the need for a separate image hosting service.

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Better Greeting Card Tips And Ideas

Do you send greeting cards to friends and family only on their birthdays? Well sending a greeting card does not have to be limited to a birthday. You are no longer limited on what type of sentiments to send or how to send them, as this practice has come a long way since the time when only the wealthy could send a card since they were handmade and very expensive. With the invention of commercial printing and the postage stamp, it easier than ever to send out your fond wishes.

There is no limit to what you can create when you are designing your own greeting card, whether it is for a birthday greeting or any other occasion that is being celebrated. Many people enjoy making their cards and with the increase in craft supply stores, it is now even easier to make one that fits your needs exactly.

Even if you believe that you do not have a creative bone in your body, the materials that are available today will allow you to create a masterpiece, or at least the recipient will think so.

Have you ever typed the phrase free greeting cards into a search engine on the internet? If so, then you are probably aware that there are thousands of sites that allow you to send a free e cards.

Sometimes the free ones are limited and you have to join the site in order to gain access to all of them. Others will send your greeting card but it will have their advertising all over it, so just check the sites carefully before sending.

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Uploading Your Images And Video To File Share Sites

File share sites are all over the net. These are sites where you can places images, video, documents for everyone to view. Some sites allow for restricted access, where only your friends can view your images. If you are concerned about privacy and you do not want just anyone to view your images, then you should look at restricting access to friends only.

There is a large range of file sharing sites, including wedding announcement sites, baby birth and college graduation announcements. You may want to upload images of your vacation to make your friends jealous. You may also want to upload images and video of your wedding, so that friends and relatives who could not attend the wedding, could see what they have missed.

Taking your own images and placing them on your website would give you a little security to ensure that not everyone can see your images, as happens with many file share sites. You can restrict access by requiring a password and limiting access to only those you want to see your words and images.

You may have a website as part of your work and you are visiting a conference and you may want to include images and video on your website, from the conference. Placing the images on file share sites does not take up bandwidth on your own server, where your site is located. So if you have a low bandwidth site and want to avoid escalating hosting costs, then you may look at using file share sites.

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Free Animation For Your Website

When you watch a motion picture, you are seeing the most common method of presenting animation, which is the rapid display of a sequence of positions to create the illusion of movement. It was not that long ago that if you were to search the term "free animation" on the internet, you would not have had many matches returned.

If you happen to run across art animations, or any type of work that is interesting to you while surfing the web and would like to add it to your site or just save it on your computer, then do you automatically assume it is a free animation? Do you check to see if they request that you do not download their work or if you do, then please link back to them? If so, do you do as they request?

Not everyone has the creative ability to design their website to look like they imagine it and at times will "borrow" 3D animations, gif animations along with other graphics or images they see on the internet. The legal issue of free animation and graphics has been around since the first public sites started appearing around 1993.

One individual may have obtained permission to use the works from the owner and put it on their site; however, if someone sees it on their site they cannot just use it, as they have to obtain permission from the original owner as well.

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Create Animation To Grab Attention

Sometimes, no matter how much traffic is driven to a website, the overall design of the site fails to catch or keep the viewer's attention. Most owners feel that a snazzy/catchy site will hold the potential customers attention long enough to generate some sales. This is one reason why designers will continue to create animation and graphics on a regular basis.

If you plan to use a computer to create animation or any other type of graphic work, then the faster your processor is the better off you will be. Computer animations can be 2D or 3D animations, and a good animator will make them look as close to real life as possible. Since you will likely be generating quite a few files when you create animations, it is also a good idea to upgrade your hard drive to something larger.

To run 2D or 3D animations software programs you will need a computer that has sufficient system requirements, such as memory, to run them, which will eliminate the need for any paper and pencils. However, some of the graphics, such as 2D animations cartoons still require penciling by hand before scanning to the computer.

The basic tools needed to create animation by computer are a system that will be able to run the software programs you will need, and of course the ability to use the programs.

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Flash Animations Adds Interactivity To Websites

The internet is full of flash animations, which is streaming animation used on web pages. Macromedia/Adobe owns the Flash software and you can find Flash menus, Flash buttons and many Flash components covering an entire website or it may just be a small part of an html site.

The desired effect of Flash is the appearance of an object that evolves smoothly into the final object. This is accomplished with either "motion tweening" or "shape tweening."

What do Flash animations have to do with a website? Hopefully, it will catch customer's eyes and bring them back to your site time and again. In this age of information technology everyone from your Great Aunt Sue to your first grade teacher has a website. Making your site stand out in the crowd is a tall order and that is where computer animations and art animations have a chance to shine.

Now that you are a little more aware of the power of the internet, check out a few computer animation programs and learn how to spice up your site with 3D animations, 2D Flash animations, animations video or gif animations.

A well designed website will make a portfolio, with its limited space and time, pretty much obsolete. So, as you look outside your window in sunny California, just imagine your website being seen by potential customers in Iceland, Timbuktu or Nunavut.

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Website Design Elements For Better Websites

Whether you work in graphic design, digital design or website design, the basic principals of designing are the same. You cannot just slap together some HTML tags on a page and call it a website.

You need to learn how to design it in a pleasant way and once you understand how the elements all work together, you will have everything you need to become a great designer.

Shape is a major element in design, and normally you see square or rectangular used on a web page, but you can create many different contours to avoid monotony. A unique website design can be created using lines and line work as well.

Lines are used to help delineate spaces around elements, are used as dividing lines between text and as decoration. They also tend to increase the readability of a design.

All of your design work starts with a blank page no matter what type of design you prefer or use. When you look at the page, do you just start placing elements and putting them around the page randomly or do you work like most good designers and actually think about the placement of the tables, graphics, text and nav bar in your website design?

The actual placement of the elements is a huge part of creating the perfect web page.

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Use A Photography Gallery To Show Your Images

Photography gallery is a collection of images you can purchase from an exhibition held by a photographer, or a number of photographic images as displayed by a gallery. You can also have a collection of your own images on a wall, on a website or in a photo album.

Online photography gallery on a website is the most accessible for most people. You do not have to travel to the gallery to view the images, you can view a range of images from the comfort of your own home. A lot of websites have a gallery of images, especially family websites.

If you are visiting a family website and you want to know a little about each member of the family, you can read their details and see an image in the photo gallery. Another example, is when you are visiting a museum site and you want to view some of the images they have at their gallery, you can view most of their images online. Quite often, there would be a list of thumbnail images and then you can click on the the thumbnail image, to see a larger image.

If you are near the museum, you may find the images so interesting, you decide you want to see the images on the wall. They look a lot clearer and sharper when you can see a full size, photographic image on the wall.

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Online Storage For Your Large Files

Online storage is an option available to store images, multimedia and video. You can also store other important files you do not use often on your computer, but are essential to your needs. Online storage helps save space on your computer, so that most of your disk is not taken up by large files, you do not use every day.

Storing your large files with online storage, frees space on your hard disk, to allow you to install programs you need to create your images, multimedia and video files. Once the files are created, you can save them with online storage.

If you are concerned you are running out of space on your computer, rather than deleting files that you may want to use in the future, you can always back up your important files to online storage, and then access the files whenever required.

This way, you can create more space on your hard disk without losing any valuable files.

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College Graduation Announcements To Tell Everyone Of Your Success

College graduation announcements tell your friends and relatives you are not at college anymore and you have graduated to the next phase of your life with a new beginning.

In your announcement, you can include your website address, where you can place images and video of your graduation. Not many of your friends and relatives can attend your college graduation ceremony, so they would be delighted to see images of your graduation event.

Your college graduation announcements should reflect the importance in this major life accomplishment.

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Wedding Announcements About The Best Day Of Your Life

Wedding announcements can be sent to your friends and family with information about your wedding. You may want to announce images and short videos from the wedding can be viewed on a website, supplying the website address.

You may want to thank those who attended the wedding and their wedding gifts with wedding announcements. You can include an image of the bride and the groom and the website address to view images and video from the wedding.

It is easy to include lots of images on the wedding website, and you can continually update the website with more images, to show life before and soon after the wedding. For example, you may include images from the honeymoon, a welcome back party and a bachelorette party(before the wedding).

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